Deadly Birdshade Sculpture

BIOGRAPHY: Charlie Tuesday Gates creates surreal assemblage sculpture out of the things she finds and collects – including the dead. She has a reputation for unique and challenging sculpture, video and performance art that confronts, questions and challenges issues of morality, ethics and the very nature of controversy itself. Although she doesn’t classify herself as such, she has been listed as one of the U.K’s top taxidermists, instrumental in bringing the new wave of taxidermy into the mainstream. Her pioneering series ‘D.I.Y Taxidermy LIVE!’ embraced an entirely new medium of workshops and live demonstrations that simply didn’t exist before. Evolving from a tongue-in-cheek demonstration in 2009, this bizarre mix of performance, improvisation, storytelling, video, puppetry and song is now a sell-out show. Working with audience participation, she skins and stuffs an animal using only the most basic ingredients: salt, sanitary towels and shake n’ vac. Participants can even eat and compete for artwork during the interval and finale of the show. Her video work uses the medium of 'Animalation', where Gates animates and distorts dead characters, real animals are manipulated by hand to perform, sing and dance. Her artwork has appeared on the cover of DESIGN WEEK, inside THE HUFFINGTON POST, TIME OUT, THE INDEPENDENT, NOTION, CLASH, MIX MAG, BIZARRE MAGAZINE, DAZED AND CONFUSED & VICE. She has worked with DIESEL, BBC FILM, FILM LONDON, FUTURE CINEMA, LOST LECTURES, ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION, set design and art direction for music videos and theatre. Born in Dorset, Gates studied sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts. She lives and works in London. ARTIST’S STATEMENT: My work comes from the time that we are all affected by the most. Childhood was a fantastically unstable affair. A strange kind of madness surrounded me. My world was constantly being destroyed and changed in a never-ending struggle to find a home. My obsession with the discarded stems from years of playing on a rubbish dump and observing my mother accumulate, sort and meticulously arrange endless amounts of other people’s dumped possessions, forgotten memories and abandoned army lives. Constantly moving home, schools, friends and father figures meant I was always new and always alone. With few friends and no constants, I would seek security in my collections... and eventually even the dead.